The world knocks at my door and I would rather not answer.

Monsters are real .They are Among Us. Monsters are lurking in our communities, our religious institutions, our courts, our politics, our economics and behind our environmental decline.

Monsters thrive on power; political, religious, legal, economic. They hide behind their power using it to gain more power; monsters’ ends justify their means.

I am interested in healing the rifts and shaking the foundations of our hierarchies. I employ narrative and world building to expose the monsters who create and thrive within the hierarchical systems of power that structure our world.  I use drawing, collage, photography, cut paper, spoken word and stop motion animation to unveil the damage created by the monsters who prosper by maintaining the invisible scaffolding of the visible world.

The act of visualizing the feelings of being bombarded with distressing, terrifying and hopeless news and realities at every moment of every day helps to process my anxieties about the social, political and environmental upheaval that we are bearing witness to. My monsters are a way for me to connect with and understand humanities’ capacity for perpetrating violence and destruction.  They create horror and pain for their own personal gain, power, and status and they are omnipresent.  Like the real-world monsters who perpetrate horror and destruction my monsters are deceptively attractive.  Intermingling parts of insects that use automimicry to disguise themselves to hide in plain sight, the seductiveness of my monsters renders their monstrosity invisible.

My interest in hierarchies of power and specifically the hierarchy that is the nature/human relationship informs the creation of my paper puppets/characters. In human mythologies and religious iconographies animal/human hybrids (frequently monsters) are imbued with otherworldly power.  In Judeo-Christian iconography angels are depicted as humans with wings can fly and talk to god. In Greek mythology, Echidna is half human, half serpent and as the “mother of all monsters” had the power to bring all monsters into our world. Such creatures, with both animal and human attributes hold more power than humans.

Early in my career I worked primarily in photography, building real world tableaux inhabited by animal-human hybrids out of confectionary and making large scale photographs, dioramas and installations. A Decadent World 2010-2019 consisted of three bodies of work- A Decadent World, A Decadent World Topiary Garden, and A Decadent World, Night. These projects primarily focused on the relationships between humanity and nature, the hierarchical power dynamics between humans and animals, and the ways humanity uses and abuses nature for beauty, pleasure and status.

Despite the difficult nature of my subject matter, my work also allows me hopefulness. Exposing the monsters and their pernicious activities is the first step in combatting and healing. Within my world building I imagine a force that pushes back against monstrosity; a savior, a counter to the monsters. An alien hybrid deity; she is not  from our world, but watches and protects it, with humor love, grace and a power that is beyond human notions.